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Tue, 31 Mar 2015 22:00:33 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Interview: Peter Tomasi on BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHThttp://nerdist.com/interview-peter-tomasi-on-batman-arkham-knight/
http://nerdist.com/interview-peter-tomasi-on-batman-arkham-knight/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2015 20:30:51 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=227961As we ramp up for the release of Batman: Arkham Knight DC Comics will be wetting our appetite with a new digital first comic series that serves as a a prequel to the hotly anticipated game. Written by Peter Tomasi with art by Viktor Bogdanovic and Art Thibert, the Batman: Arkham Knight comic is set to kick all kinds of butt. We were fortunate enough to talk with Tomasi about writing the new series, his thought on the games, and his idea of a Major League Baseball comic book.

Nerdist: You’ve been handling Batman and Robin – which has been amazing, by the way – but now you are jumping into a very different Batman universe. How is writing this Batman different from writing the Batman of the DC Universe?

Peter Tomasi: Thanks for the kind words about Batman and Robin, but I’ve gotta be honest, writing Batman I feel is the same across all media platforms. He’s the goddamn Batman – he will kick your ass in comic books, animated series, video games, TV shows, and feature films – if it ain’t broke don’t mess with it!

N: Do you have to work differently when writing for digital first as opposed to print? Does it change your process at all?

PT: Nope. Building story and character I feel is the same. The big visual cues and some of the transitions change due to digital-first splashes and double page spreads, but in the end you still have to grab a reader’s attention, be it on an iPad or inside a comic book. If they don’t care about the characters, it’s just noise and the reader’s fingers and eyes are moving on to the next thing.

N: Are you a fan of the games? Do readers need to play the games in order to enjoy this series?

PT: I am a big time fan of the games. My son and I really enjoy the world that DC and Rocksteady built! We crank the volume and blow out the 5.1 speakers in the basement way too much for my wife’s liking! And no how, no way do you need to play the games in order to enjoy the series. You can come in completely cold and still have a blast. All you need to be is a Batman fan and all is right with the world!

N: One aspect that has been teased a lot is that this series will feature a Bruce Wayne who is in “devastating pain.” Can you tell us what that entails?

PT: The pain comes from the hell that Bruce and Gotham have suffered through and how he deals with it and goes about rebuilding the city not just in the darkness as Batman, but as the very public Bruce Wayne.

N: The villain in the game, Arkham Knight, is a new character. How’s he going to put Batman through the wringer and what separates him from Batman’s traditional rogue gallery?

N: I’d sure as hell would like to tell you more about Arkham Knight and his plans for Batman, but my editor, Alex Antone, is a master sharpshooter and I hear he can shoot a finger off a writer from 3,000 miles out.

N: Will any other Batman rogues or allies be showing up in the comic series?

PT: Absolutely. We’ll be seeing a whole bunch of Batman’s rogues, along with Arkham Knight, like Scarecrow, Penguin, and of course, Harley Quinn! And when it comes to the allies, I’ll be dipping into the Bat Family big time, so keep your eyes peeled for Alfred, Robin, Nightwing, Oracle, and of course Gordon, and many others from the game too!

N: Artist Victor Bogdanovic is a bit of a newcomer to the mainstream comic world. How is the book looking so far?

PT: Freakin’ great is how it’s looking! Vik is doing an amazing job and I’m loving the energy he’s bringing to the characters and the pages themselves!

N:Ifyou were to write another comic series based on a popular (or unpopular) video game series, what would you do?

PT: I’ve great a great idea for an MLB: The Show comic! Bats and balls in the hands of professionals can be deadly!

]]>http://nerdist.com/interview-peter-tomasi-on-batman-arkham-knight/feed/2Exclusive: Todd McFarlane on His WALKING DEAD Building Sets — Find Out How You Can Win One!http://nerdist.com/exclusive-todd-mcfarlane-on-his-walking-dead-building-sets-find-out-how-you-can-win-one/
http://nerdist.com/exclusive-todd-mcfarlane-on-his-walking-dead-building-sets-find-out-how-you-can-win-one/#commentsWed, 12 Nov 2014 21:00:12 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=200367Todd McFarlane’s no stranger to The Walking Dead, having helped form the very company that’s published Robert Kirkman’s zombie saga, Image Comics. And, through his McFarlane Toys, he’s responsible for perhaps the hottest Walking Dead merchandise on the planet — the official action figures of both the comic book and TV show. Now, McFarlane is taking the undead phenomenon to a new level by introducing the next step in building toys — Walking Dead Construction Sets. We recently caught up with McFarlane, and — in addition to sharing his thoughts on major league baseball and Brian Wood’s upcoming run on Spawn — the multi-hyphenate talked about his plans for the next wave of Dead toys.

You can read our conversation below, and you can get a chance to win your very own Walking Dead set — featuring either Daryl and his chopper (pictured above) or the infamous Governor’s room (below)! Enter to win by simply sharing this post on Twitter using the hashtag #DeadGiveaway. You can craft a tweet of your own or just click here. Contest ends next Wednesday, November 19th, at midnight. (Contest rules here.) Good luck!

Nerdist: I want to start where we always start. We’re going to talk a little bit of baseball, and you’re going to explain to me what I should be paying attention to now that we’re in the post season. So how does the effects of the post-season affect what you decide to make in your lines in the next year?

Todd McFarlane: Well, two things. Number one, you can get career years fatigue. So the teams this year, the Royals and the Orioles, haven’t been in there for decades. All of a sudden, now, they’re going to come in. If they end up pulling it all off at the end, then they become sort of the talk of the town. They become Cinderella a little bit. If anybody on one of those teams, or on the Giants or Cardinals, decides to go off and do something crazy, or they hit three walk-off homers in three consecutive nights in the World Series, everybody’s going to know who that player’s name is.

So right now, it may be the seventh batter on the team that is an okay player that most of us know, but they’re not nationally known. And you can do stuff in sporting events that will put you on a national stage, that will get you national attention. And so if you win the Super Bowl and you’re the MVP of the Super Bowl, you can carry a lot for your entire group.

N: So something like Jeter retiring captain, would that make him a prime guy for a figure next year?

TM: Yes. Since he gave us the heads-up that he was retiring, we go, “Good, we’re not chasing it.” We can actually do it in advance of him coming into his sort of big heyday right now, where everybody is talking about him.

N: That leads us to the next question. The thing you’re working on now — the builds are finding a huge fan base that are creating what you’re putting out there to design, but they’re also having a blast building their own scenarios, like destroying the watchtower to make it look like the end of the season — things like that. Everybody was kind of questioning whether or not this was a great idea, but it seems like fans are really taking to it. They love these mini-figures and the builds. How does that feel now that you’re getting a lot of great feedback on it?

TM: People saying nice things only goes so far. At the end of the day, we still have to do commerce. So what’s going to prove that it’s successful is if I get a phone call from Toys ‘R Us, who gets the exclusive for 2014, and then eventually my other retailer phoning me and saying, “Hey, the product you’re giving us is selling. Do you have any more?” Then we can give them some more.

So if we sell a lot, then they’ll go, “Hey, Todd – we’ll offer you half.” It does two things. It allows me then to expand some of the ideas, maybe even some of the price points on what we’re thinking about with The Walking Dead, and it also allows me to then go and get other brands. There’s one brand I think is pretty strong. They just said, “Give us the data from the first two weeks of your sales. If it works, we’re in.” They’re sort of going in “You think older people want to build stuff?” I go, “Yes, I do!” When I was younger, I built model kits. And so to me this is sort of this weird hybrid. It has all the same mechanics of everybody else’s build. It’s just at the very end when I put that skin on it, it then looks like a model kit. It looks like art. It looks like a diorama. And so the answer is yeah. It’s hard for me to imagine that every adult’s going to say, “No, it kind of looks like that popular thing I already collect, but I don’t need a mini version of it. I need something bigger or more expensive.” It just doesn’t seem like it.

N: So we’ve talked a few times now over the past couple of years and it always just amazes me that you don’t stop. Do you think there’s going to be a point where you’re going to slow down or do you just keep finding more things that you want to go after? You were going to slow down, but then you went after the building kits.

TM: Here’s the smarter answer. There’s really two Todds at my company at all times. There’s Todd the artist and Todd the CEO. So it depends on what the conversation is, what hat I’m wearing at any given time. I think the question is a little bit backwards. The question isn’t “Todd, are you going to be the CEO and let other people do it?” The smarter one is “Todd, can you find a CEO so you can do more art?” I have to remind my employees from time to time where I’m like, “Guys, I need you to be good at the business side of it so I have more time to do the art, because essentially everything that you see in this company started because the Todd the artist guy had the time to think of stuff. If you let me have the time to think of stuff, then it’s better for the business than me thinking of business and spread sheets.” I can hire people to do that. I can replicate that. What’s a little bit harder to replicate is people with goofy ideas. I’ve got a lot of them but my value isn’t as a CEO, my value is the artist side. Let me do more art.

If it’s more Walking Dead you crave, watch the latest videos from Nerdist.com.

N: I’m going to wrap this up where we always kind of end things. I’ve got to talk about Spawn. You’ve created this character that, at its core, is about rebirth and renewal; and every time you bring on a new creative team it’s great to see them focus your vision and bring new things to the table. Since you’ve got a new team coming on, what can we look forward to out of them and how much freedom are you giving them now?

TM: Let’s talk about the mechanics of it, then we’ll talk about the freedom. Spawn #250 comes out — big anniversary issue, triple size, and at the end of it, the return of Al Simmons. The original Spawn comes back. All right, fans should be okay with that. But here’s where the creative team comes in — the goal is to bring him back as a changed man. If you took a guy who was nineteen and you put him in prison for twenty years I have to assume that when he walks out, he’s not the same guy. Something happens to him. He’s either going to go squirrely, or he’s going to go, “I need to change my life.” So the new Al coming back is now smarter, more mature, more calculating. He now has a plan — before, he didn’t have a plan. He was like, “Leave me alone, I want to live my life!” Now he’s going to have a plan. He’s going to know what the consequences of his plan are. He’s going to be a mature guy. He’s going to know the game he’s playing. Before, he didn’t really know the rules of the game he was playing. He knows the rules. He’s going to try to take advantage of the rules.

Our greater goal, both artistically and in the writing, especially with the new writer Brian Wood… I said “Hey, your goal is to make me seem irrelevant. People should be going ‘Why did we waste the first two hundred and fifty issues reading Todd’s shit when now we’ve got this cool stuff?’ If you can get me to that point — if you can get me to the point where people think that what I did for the first twenty years was a waste of time, then you will be my best friend.”

If all you’re going to do is regurgitate my own stuff back at me, you’re going to exhaust me. I don’t want it. I want somebody who’s got the courage to say “Todd, I like some of the stuff you did. I’m going to keep like thirty percent of it. The core is still going to be Spawn, but I don’t know why you didn’t do this and this and this and this. When I was reading the book, I thought he should have done this and this and this.” That’s the guy I want. I want to go, “Pretend I gave you the trademark and the copyright to this. What would you do with it? Don’t try to please me. Please yourself. If you do that, I think you’re going to be a lot closer to the right path than the other way around.”

N: Well, Brian Wood is an amazing choice. That guy can write anything. I don’t want to call anything Woodsian, but he brings this authenticity to his characters, and I can’t wait to see what he does.

TM: What I like about him is he’s shown a range. He can do sort of tight urban stuff, and then he can do this classic X-Men stuff. So the range is there. So I’m encouraging him. We’re talking about the mythos of Spawn. We had breakfast this morning. So just do clever stories within that range, and you’re never going to hear a peep from me.

N: As a Brian Wood fan and as a Spawn fan, hearing that you’re kind of letting him off leash and letting him go — I’m excited.

TM: I’m hoping that – because sometimes I can be a big presence, and they’ll go ,“Give me your ideas,” and I do most of the talking. I don’t want him doing my ideas. I just don’t think he’s read all two hundred and fifty issues. I’m just trying to give him an overview of two hundred and fifty issues. “Here’s where the characters are, what they’re doing. Here’s the mentality, here’s the motives. You can use any, or none of what I just said to you. I’m just saying that if you have an idea, maybe there’s a characters that you can plug into it, so you have a little bit of continuity. Or you can say, ‘No, no, no, I have another character that I think can fill in, because then I don’t have that baggage.'” So I’m going. “Knock yourself out!” My only criticism of his work will be if I feel like I’ve read that issue, or I feel like I wrote that issue.

N: And that’s a fair bar to set.

TM: Right. And then artistically with Jonboy Meyers, he’s already wound up going “Can I change the costume? Can I do this? Can I do that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, if it looks cool.” I mean, badass works on a lot of levels.

So one of the things that is going to happen when he comes back is that he’s going to be completely in control of his costume, which has never happened in two hundred and fifty issues. So now the costume’s going to be his dog, and the dog listens to the master very well. So he can now sort of go in and out of public and look however he wants, because the costume is going to be able to look like whatever he needs to look like, and he’s going to be able to move in plain sight a little bit and not draw attention to himself but still move amongst the humans and not have to hide all the time.

]]>http://nerdist.com/exclusive-todd-mcfarlane-on-his-walking-dead-building-sets-find-out-how-you-can-win-one/feed/2GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY’s Chris Pratt Goes to Baseball Game, Is Adorablehttp://nerdist.com/guardians-of-the-galaxys-chris-pratt-goes-to-baseball-game-is-adorable/
http://nerdist.com/guardians-of-the-galaxys-chris-pratt-goes-to-baseball-game-is-adorable/#commentsThu, 04 Sep 2014 17:45:14 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=180073As if leading the sci-fi hit of the summer and dressing up as Star-Lord to visit a children’s hospital weren’t enough, Chris Pratt, a/k/a the internet’s collective boyfriend, has gone and stolen our hearts again. The Guardians of the Galaxy and Parks and Recreation actor swung by Wrigley Field last night to throw the game’s first pitch, take selfies with fans, and even sing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame”:

While Chris Pratt may have mastered rapping and the elusive french braid, he apparently can’t throw a pitch. (Although, have you ever tried to do a french braid? I mean, I’ve never done it successfully. Who’s to say which is more difficult?) But, as you may have guessed, even his awkward pitch is endearing.

According to Uproxx, Pratt is in town filming the final season of Parks and Recreation, and stopped by to share his love for the Cubs and make everyone’s night. After a hugely successful year with The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy, Pratt’s star power shows absolutely no sign of losing momentum anytime soon. He’s got Parks and Recreation to close out (and I, for one, hope his newfound celebrity inspires everyone to go back and watch the show on Netflix), and another project coming out next year: you know, a little movie called Jurassic World. His not-so-rapid (cough Everwood) rise to fame is 100% deserved, and we can’t wait to see what else his career (and charming antics) has in store.

]]>http://nerdist.com/guardians-of-the-galaxys-chris-pratt-goes-to-baseball-game-is-adorable/feed/4Jeff Bridges Summoned The Dude on The First Pitch at a Dodger’s Gamehttp://nerdist.com/jeff-bridges-summoned-the-dude-on-the-first-pitch-at-a-dodgers-game/
http://nerdist.com/jeff-bridges-summoned-the-dude-on-the-first-pitch-at-a-dodgers-game/#commentsTue, 05 Aug 2014 15:30:08 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=172112Jeff Bridges abided The Big Lebowski fans and did The Dude proud with a bowled-out first pitch during a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game. Because The Dude will never die! Nor will our love for the character or actor.

Throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game is an honor reserved for many esteemed types. On one fateful Star Wars night, our own Chris Hardwick threw out the first strike of the game. But we’re overjoyed to see that Bridges did his best at making the whole affair his own. Instead of potentially embarrassing himself, or being unremarkably good at tossing a leather thing at a person waiting with another leather glove thing a few yards away, Bridges wound up with goofy aplomb and proceeded to bowl the ball over home plate — just as The Dude would’ve done.

There’s no greater honor for a bowling ball man than bringing that sort of glory to another sport with balls. Sure, it’s likely impossible that such a feat would really ever be successful in any other sport than, say, soccer because, well, y’know, most balls need to be in the air. But we give him points for doing it his way regardless. That’s the truest way of The Dude. Because, dare we say it, the man’s got balls in spades and he might as well use ‘em. Never, ever, ever change Jeff Bridges. Not for anyone, not ever.

If you were given the opportunity to toss a ceremonial pitch, which of your favorite TV/movie characters would you emulate in your ball delivery methods? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

]]>http://nerdist.com/jeff-bridges-summoned-the-dude-on-the-first-pitch-at-a-dodgers-game/feed/1Interview: THE BATTERED BASTARDS OF BASEBALL Directors Chapman and Maclain Wayhttp://nerdist.com/interview-the-battered-bastards-of-baseball-directors-chapman-and-maclain-way/
http://nerdist.com/interview-the-battered-bastards-of-baseball-directors-chapman-and-maclain-way/#commentsFri, 11 Jul 2014 21:45:55 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=166024The Battered Bastards of Baseball is the documentary directed by Chapman and Maclain Way, and now available on Netflix, about Bing Russell and a little known minor league baseball team in Portland called the Mavericks. Bing, who briefly played ball professionally before enjoying a successful Hollywood acting career, bought the territory when the city lost its longtime minor league affiliate and formed a single-A team to operate outside the confines of major league baseball. The only thing uniting his players, recruited at open tryouts, was that no other team wanted them but his quirky, unkempt castoffs won games, and they won fans, shattering minor league attendance records.

Nerdist spoke with directors Chapman and Maclain Way about their grandfather, Bing Russell, his journey with the Portland Mavericks, the rebellious sprit that runs in their family, and putting everything they had into making their first feature film.

Where did Chapman and Maclain Way get the idea for the documentary about the Mavericks? Was it a story they heard their whole lives as kids? According to Chapman, that was very much not the case. “Growing up, all we knew was that our grandfather owned a professional baseball team in the ‘70s and that was it. I think that [Kurt Russell’s] acting career was a big topic in our family and we have a cousin (Matt Franco) who plays major league baseball… so Bing’s time up in Portland wasn’t really discussed and we didn’t really know anything about it so it was kind of a forgotten story.”

“I think the first big thing is obviously we didn’t want to make a family documentary, we wanted to make something that would resonate with sports fans and non-sports fans,” Chapman continued. “Mac and I are big into independent film and independent music and when we found out this was the only independent baseball team in America in 1973 and that all of these hundreds of independent teams had died off and this was the last one, it was a real interesting jumping off point for us as filmmakers and story tellers to dive into.”

It’s become kind of a tired sports joke that nobody likes baseball anymore. Maclain agreed and although he still loves the game, he found that this documentary appears to have more in common with independent filmmakers and musicians than one might think. “I was a big baseball fan growing up, and still am,” he said. “In high school I started, because of my older brothers influenced me, I started getting into independent film and music too, and one of the things I realized when we were first starting to make this documentary that I thought was really cool was the idea that there’s a very strong sports community but there’s also a very strong independent film, independent music community, there’s not too much overlap between these groups. [The] idea that we could make a documentary on a sports team and take it to film festivals and engage these communities… and these people who are like, ‘You know what? I liked baseball as a kid but now I feel the reconnection to the game,’ and that’s been really, it’s been a fantastic feeling being able to do that.”

Once you watch The Battered Bastards of Baseball it becomes clear that rebellion is something that runs in the family. It seems like this film being distributed through Netflix is a great fit. Chapman agreed, saying, “[Netflix] was kind of a perfect partner for us. Netflix has a history of going against the grain and striking out on their own and carving their own path and we can’t help but notice the similarities ourselves between the Mavericks independent spirit and us as independent filmmakers and doing what they do so it’s really been a match made in heaven… It’s going to give us the opportunity to get our film out to an incredibly wide audience.” Chapman continued, saying, “[W]e financed this entire documentary ourselves, it was a very, very low budget, none of us took salaries on this thing, Mac even had to sell his car at the end to pay for post production, so when you put everything you can into a film its incredibly exciting to know that you’re going to have a distributor like Netflix that’s going to get the film out to a wide, wide audience so for us its really been a perfect match.”

After the film makes its debut on Netflix, Maclain says they’ve got their sights on scripted with someone who is fairly close to the team. “We went into Sundance without distribution but another product we were kind of out on the marketplace [with] was the narrative rights to do a scripted version on the Mavericks… we were really excited and what happened was we were really passionate about having Todd Fields (In The Bedroom and former Mavericks bat boy) attached as the writer and director… we actually ended up teaming up with Justin Lin, his production company… optioned the rights to do it and Todd’s currently attached to write and direct and I think that for us Todd just has such a great perspective on the Mavericks. He totally gets the story and gave such a phenomenal interview and he was a bat boy at the time so it’s a great perspective on the Mavericks so that’s the other thing that we’re moving forward to, so we’re excited.”

The Battered Bastards of Baseball, with Kurt Russell, Todd Fields and Jim Bouton and directed by Chapman Way and Maclain Way, is now available to stream instantly on Netflix.

]]>http://nerdist.com/interview-the-battered-bastards-of-baseball-directors-chapman-and-maclain-way/feed/1Netflix Doc THE BATTERED BASTARDS OF BASEBALL Gets First Trailerhttp://nerdist.com/netflix-doc-the-battered-bastards-of-baseball-gets-first-trailer/
http://nerdist.com/netflix-doc-the-battered-bastards-of-baseball-gets-first-trailer/#commentsTue, 24 Jun 2014 22:15:22 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=161085Baseball fans are few and far between these days. I love the game but I also like sitting outside in the summer and fall and eating, drinking and socializing until something important happens. Oh, and did I mention that I grew up in Atlanta in the ’90s during what was arguably one of the two greatest baseball clubs in the history of the game? All things considered, baseball really is the sport for me.

This morning Netflix released the official trailer for The Battered Bastards of Baseball, a documentary about actor Bing Russell, who happens to be the father of Hollywood icon Kurt Russell, starting the Portland Mavericks, a scrappy, independent baseball team of underdogs. Directed by Maclain and Chapman Way and starring Kurt Russell, Todd Fields and Jim Bouton, The Battered Bastards of Baseball explains that the only thing uniting Bing Russell’s players, recruited at open tryouts, was that no other team wanted them. Skeptics agreed that it could never work. But Bing understood a ballplayer’s dreams, having played professional for a time himself, and he most definitely understood an audience. His quirky, unkempt castoffs won games and fans, shattering minor-league attendance records. Their spirit was contagious, and during their short reign, the Mavericks—a restaurant owner turned manager, left-handed catcher, and blackballed pitcher among them—brought independence back to baseball and embodied what it was all about: the love of the game.

Released in the wake of the first day of summer, have a look at the trailer for The Battered Bastards of Baseball. The film premieres on Netflix Friday, July 11.

John C. McGinley has acted in some of our favorite movies and TV shows, like Se7en, The Rock, and, of course, his nine-year stint as Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs. In 42, he portrays the real-life announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers the year that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, Red Barber. Mr. McGinley was nice enough to speak to us about what it took to portray such a larger-than-life historical figure, how filming the movie mirrored Red’s real life, and what he’s doing next with the creator of Scrubs.

NERDIST: We here at Nerdist don’t generally like sports movies, but we really enjoyed 42.

JOHN C. MCGINLEY: Oh yeah? Why is that?

N: Well, the characters were so rich and interesting and sometimes sports movies are too much about the sport and not about the characters.

JCM: I totally buy that. When you go back to Jimmy Caan and Billy Dee Williams doing Brian’s Song, about Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers, it’s not really about football, it’s about how much these two men loved each other and cared about each other and how profoundly impacted they were by loss. It doesn’t have that much to do with football, and so, yeah, I buy that. I buy exactly what you’re talking about.

N: You played broadcast announcer Red Barber in 42, and what was interesting is that he, as a personality, was very fair to everybody and wouldn’t become friends with players, etc. Did you watch or listen to a lot of Red’s game broadcasts in preparation?

JCM: Yeah, Brian Helgeland the director provided me with about half a dozen or eight or so World Series broadcasts that Red did with Mel Allen. I have a rehearsal space that I use out here in Malibu almost as an acting laboratory, and I just went down to the space and kind of obsessed out on this sound, which was so alien, and I tried to figure it out; he has two autobiographies, so I read about him and what I figured out is that, because this guy was born in Mississippi, raised in Sanford, FL, came up through the Cincinnati Reds organization, and then wound up in Brooklyn, I think that those four regions so impacted him and were so imprinted on his cadence and his syncopation that he borrowed a little bit from each of those regions and it yielded that sound of which Brooklyn Dodger fans, obviously an aging demographic, hold so dear. They hold it like a father holds a son. They’re crazy about Red Barber, and the self-imposed mandate on my end was to elevate to that, to take some integrity and elevate to him. You know, usually when you do a film, somebody wants you to bring your flavor, bring your cavalcade of eccentricities; I wanted to bring Red, really pragmatically, and that’s where I stayed on point, right in that groove.

N: Actors sometimes get to play the same character in multiple movies that aren’t necessarily sequels. You do such a good job playing Red, and he’s such an interesting character, do you think you’d want to pursue something like that and play him again?

JCM: Oh, my God, yeah! I mean, because 42 is not the Red Barber story, it’s the Jackie Robinson story. So, what I was lucky enough to get to do in 42, parenthetically, is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Red Barber goes. So, oh my gosh, I’d do it in a second.

N: You’ve had such a varied career and you create such dynamic characters, but here you are playing a real person; what kind of skills did you have to employ to be able to do that?

JCM: I consumed everything I could about him as far as facts go. His two books, and then Brian Helgeland gave me one other book, so I read three books on one guy; I’ve never read three books on one guy! I’ve never played anyone who had three books written about him. And then I just spent so much time down in the space with those CDs. It was embarrassing. But, all that stuff, actors function out of fear, so I was afraid. I wanted to elevate to Red, I didn’t want to bring him down to me. That seemed like the marching orders that I gave myself.

N: Were you able to see some of the actors playing the games in the movie?

JCM: I was in a giant soundstage in Atlanta and the day before [we shot my scenes] the whole company was wrapped. And that’s good and bad. The good part is, for the three or four days that I was there shooting, it got to be the Red Barber show. So, I didn’t come up for air; I stayed right in the mix. And, the bad part is I didn’t get to meet any of this ensemble of actors, which is a pretty astonishing group. So, I regretted that, but completely self-indulgently, I got to stay in Red’s skin for 96 hours and not come out.

N: It’s fascinating how much that parallels Red Barber’s actual experiences with away games, which they always had to recreate because he was in the studio.

JCM: Oh, you’re right! You realize, the generation before Red, they weren’t even going out to Ebbets Field; they were down in the basement, the bowels of the Chrysler Building, and they were reading ticker-tape dispatches from either Ebbets Field or from the Polo Grounds or from up in the Bronx at Yankee Stadium, and they were recreating the game using ticker-tape.

N: That’s amazing.

JCM: It blows my mind!

N: And that’s what you had to do. You had to go and film after everybody left.

JCM: And I was looking at nothing. I was looking at a big piece of cloth. Those were four really, really exciting days, I’ll tell you that.

N: What do you have coming up we can look forward to?

JCM: I just finished a run on Broadway with Al Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross, which was easily the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life. I played Dave Moss, so I was the straw that stirs the drink. And, we did a pilot with the guy who invented Scrubs, Bill Lawrence, for TBS called Ground Floor and it got picked up. First week of August, we go to Warner Bros. Stage 19, and do it in front of a live studio audience. We get to do ten and it’ll be on TBS in December and if it does any ratings, hopefully we’ll do it for a couple years.

N: That is exciting to hear, because we’re huge fans of Scrubs.

JCM: It was a funny transition in retrospect. Not, funny; it felt really organic and natural in retrospect to go from 1,400 people a night at the Schoenfeld Theatre with Al on stage to 300 people in the audience over at Warner Bros. doing Ground Floor, and I just felt like my skills were as keen as they’d ever been.

N: That must be great for you, having done so much theater.

JCM: It felt really really good. It just sort of goosed the engine a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, I loved doing Scrubs, but it was five 14-hour days; you’re grinding. You’ve got to pull a rabbit out of the hat on Scrubs. With this, you ostensibly have four days to rehearse and massage and rewrite the material and then you shoot it on the fifth day. So, that felt really, really exciting and fun.

]]>http://nerdist.com/john-c-mcginley-on-becoming-42s-red-barber/feed/6See Chris Throw Out The First Pitch At the Dodgers’ Star Wars Night 7/2http://nerdist.com/see-chris-throw-out-the-first-pitch-at-dodger-stadium-for-star-wars-night-72/
http://nerdist.com/see-chris-throw-out-the-first-pitch-at-dodger-stadium-for-star-wars-night-72/#commentsThu, 21 Jun 2012 01:00:54 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=48470All right, now you know, from today’s hostful Nerdist Podcast, that Chris Hardwick will be throwing out the first pitch at Dodger Stadium for Star Wars Night at the ballpark before the Dodgers take on the Cincinnati Reds at 7:10 pm on July 2nd, He’ll be there to help promote Course of the Force. You want to be there, right? You can, and here’s a great way to do that:

The Dodgers are offering a special ticket for that night that includes admission to a special Star Wars section in the right field Coca-Cola All-You-Can-Eat Pavilion, and, yes, that means all you can eat — unlimited Dodger Dogs, nachos, peanuts, popcorn and soft drinks. You’ll also get a special limited-edition Dodgers/Star Wars t-shirt — I’ve seen the design, and you’ll like it. And in that section, Star Wars characters will be visiting you, too, and you’ll be with your fellow Star Wars fans, so it should be a lot of fun. Did I mention all you can eat Dodger Dogs? Farmer John FTW.

Tickets for that section are available right this very second — they’re $39.25 per ticket, including fees, which is a really good deal when you consider that you’re getting a t-shirt AND the food AND the atmosphere. Buy them by clicking here. Delay you should not, lest you miss out. And get there early, because you won’t want to miss Chris throwing that first pitch. I know I’m intensely curious.

Minor league baseball teams are forever at the leading edge of culinary innovation. Bacon cheeseburger on a Krispy Kreme glazed? Gateway Grizzlies (although variations, like the Luther Burger, have been around for a while). Hot dogs in funnel cake? The Northwest Arkansas Naturals. A 4,889 calorie chili burger with chips and salsa ON the burger? West Michigan Whitecaps.

What is it? A hot dog inside a bratwurst inside a kielbasa, on a hoagie roll with sauerkraut and spicy mustard. The Turducken of ballpark hot dogs.

Hmm. Actually, that sounds… no, no, that’s just not right.

I know, these things are aimed at a certain demographic, the young male with a bunch of friends, the guy who’s prone to “hey, watch this!” stunts (“Dude, you’re not really gonna eat that… look, he’s eating it… DUDE! Awesome!”). And I do watch “Man vs. Food.” But these things should remain as interesting concepts. Just because it’s on the menu doesn’t mean you have to order it, much less eat it.